48. Egoistic Justice

Author: Kiki
Raw: https://novel18.syosetu.com/n2498fn/51/
Translator: Lilia v4
Editor: Yuriko AYA

On the road to Gravard, camping out should not have been necessary.
There were towns within walking distance, and a maintained highway connected them.
But Lily, having fled a town under vampire rule, would not approach human settlements after that.
She did not wish, wherever she went, to produce victims on her account.
Whether she went or not, this country was fated to fall under vampire rule, and she understood that—it was a futile struggle, in short. If she did not look, reality would not yet be fixed.

She sat with her knees up, hands upon them, and stared at the wavering flame.
Sparks snapped. The fire lit the dim forest.
Sara leaned against her, her head dipping and lifting in a doze.
At last her eyes, unable to bear the gravity of sleep, closed, and she fell.

“Of course she’s tired. I only hope the dreams, at least, are kind.”

Lily said it, and smiled at the faint breathing.
Sara had only just seen a nightmare of a landscape; she must be exhausted in mind and in body.
Or perhaps it would be better not to dream at all.
To sink into a deep sleep and find, when she noticed, that her eyes were open.
Time that passed while one remained awake from a dream would wear even Lily’s mind down, steadily.
She did not think Sara could endure it.

“Not that I can say I will endure it myself.”

Her senses were keener; it might be harder for Lily.

“Ah, I know. I know. You’re watching even now, aren’t you? From far or near, I don’t know—but from somewhere I can reach, staring, waiting for the moment my heart breaks!”

Her voice carried through the quiet forest.
Of course there was no answer.
Even so, her honed senses were certainly catching some misshapen presence peering in.
She could not sleep.
How could she sleep.
In an unknown land, in an unknown forest, Lily spent a long, long night alone.

◇◇◇

 

After that, too, Lily kept her visits to towns to the minimum.
When supplies ran out and she was forced to use a shop, she would not use one whose clerk was a woman.
To Sara, the behavior looked pathological.

“Um … Lily.”

They were perhaps halfway to Gravard.
Walking the highway, Sara spoke to her timidly.
Conversation had fallen off sharply of late. Distance had been opening between them.
The cause, of course, was mostly Lily.
She had not slept once since leaving the capital, and she had not been eating properly.
An ordinary human would have collapsed long since.
That she could still keep moving was only because of a body tempered as a knight—but—

“Lily.”

—There was no answer.
She only muttered something under her breath and went on, and on, ahead.
She did not seem to hear Sara’s voice.
However trained, she was human in the end. There is a limit.
Lily’s body and mind had reached theirs. She was on the verge of collapse.
Nothing showed it more plainly than her face.

Eyes wide, forgetting even to blink, bloodshot.
A complexion so ashen she looked wasted.
The muscles of her cheeks drawn as if in a smile.
She might have been a narcotic addict in withdrawal.

Always watched. Never knowing when she would be attacked. Not a single ally.
That conviction was driving her into a corner.
It was not entirely unfounded.
And yet a line of thought that only wore her down, obsessive as a compulsion, was nothing but a hindrance.
The calm, collected Lily of ordinary days would have cut it away at once: useless to think about.
She could not, because the present was abnormal.
And because not only Camilla, but every vampire she met, seemed to be denying her values.

“I am … not wrong. I am right. Justice wins. Rightness will be proven. If I can only, only reach Gravard …”
“Lily …”

The frail little princess could only watch, from beside her, a knight coming slowly apart.
Outside the toy-box of the castle, she was terribly powerless.

 

◇◇◇

 

And then, exactly a week after they left the castle, they reached Gravard at last.
They were later than planned. The sun was already declining.
A madder sunset shone through thin cloud upon sky and earth; the world was dyed a strange violet.
In that landscape Sara and Lily stood before the town.
No—more precisely, before the site where a town had been.

“Imposs … ible …”

How many times had Lily murmured that word since leaving the capital?
Even among her many repetitions, this one was steeped in a despair thicker than the rest.
Strength left her. She went to her knees.

“Ha … haha … hahahahah …!”

What spread before her was bare ground. Not even grass grew.
Gravard had been, after the capital, one of the two or three greatest cities in the kingdom, and a major military seat besides.
It had vanished without a trace.
Anyone would have wanted to laugh. Anyone would have wanted to flee into unreality.

“Sara. This is a dream, isn’t it? I haven’t woken from last night’s dream—I can’t have! Tell me that’s so!”

Lily pleaded, turning rolling eyes on Sara.
Looking at that landscape, and at her beloved knight in confusion, the young princess was strangely calm.
As if she had expected this.
Lily, who had been certain Sara would be as bewildered as herself, tilted her head.

“Sara?”

Sara did not answer the call.
She only looked at what Gravard had become: sand lifted and thrown by the wind.
The silence lasted a while. Then she spoke, as if she had just remembered.

“Camilla said she loved you, Lily. More strongly, more deeply, than anyone else could match.”
“… What?”
“She only wanted to set you free. To make you happy. From the time you met, that was all she thought about.”
“And what of it?”
“She said: if you had accepted her, she would have taken me to the same place.”

Lily could not follow.
Why, at this moment, had Sara begun to speak of Camilla?
And why was she speaking of the Camilla who had tried to charm her and make her a vampire as if of a memory with a friend?

“Did you want to become a vampire, Sara? Did you want to become a hideous monster like that?!”

It hurt her to have called a friend who had become a vampire for her sake “hideous.”
Even so, she could not help asking.
She was the captain of the knights, and she always made the correct choice.

“It is not that I wished for that, exactly. But … I thought it was the only way to stay with you.”
“We are together now, like this! Is that not enough?”
“You know, and you are being disingenuous. Why I wanted to be at your side. Why I was so glad when you called me by my name. Why I was so happy that the two of us came to travel together. I will not let you say you do not know.”

It was Sara’s true heart, which Lily had long turned her eyes from.
Of course she had known.
She had known, and had pretended not to see—her own feelings included.
Because she was captain of the knights, and a woman.
And because Sara was a princess, and a woman.
A knight and a princess were not permitted to love one another. Love between women was still more unthinkable.
Common sense denied it, and so Lily, who lived correctly, denied it too.
A simple, easy chain of logic, in which her own will had no part.

“Camilla must have felt the same. There cannot have been anyone who loved Lily the knight-captain. And still you clung, as if cursed, to that station. Even knowing you would not be rewarded.”
“She wanted to save a person like me, is that it? Hah … I will say it again, Sara. Even so, what of it. What has any of this to do with the present?!”

Lily pressed her, irritable. Sara answered as if she were calm.

“Camilla said there were two ways to save you.”
“Two?”
“The first was that you would accept her. If you could live together as vampires and throw away human entanglements, she thought she might free you from the curse.”
“But that … I refused.”
“Yes. You did. So the plan shifted, naturally, toward carrying out the second method.”
“And that second?”

Lily’s voice shook, faintly.
For some reason she had become desperately afraid of hearing it.
The capital had fallen.
Gravard had vanished.
This country was being ruled by those who were not human.
If the trigger for all of it had been her killing of Camilla—

“If you cannot change it from within, change the world.”
“Change … the world?”
“I mean it literally. If persuading you is impossible, then change the environment around you. Not unbind the curse—eliminate whatever it is that forces the curse on you.”

Who had forced Lily to be captain of the knights?
Her parents? The king? The knights now dead? The soldiers? The people—?

“In other words: the elimination of humans.”

There had been eyes.
Everywhere, a swarm of gazes that decided Lily must be correct, because she was captain of the knights.
In every part of the world.
Sometimes it was called morals, sometimes rules, sometimes the pressure to conform.
The stifling fetters of conduct that fill the human world.
If all of that vanished, Lily would no longer need to remain captain.
It made a kind of sense. She could see that.

“Such a thing … cannot be …”

She could not believe it.
And yet, as reality, a world coming apart existed before her eyes.
Camilla had accomplished it.
For Lily’s sake alone.

“No—wait. Camilla should already be dead! How could she eliminate humans?!”
“Vampires have an ability, it seems, to sacrifice their own lives and pass their power as vampires to another.”
“But Camilla died in front of me!”
“Vampires do not die from a thing of that degree.”
“Wha … then, at that time, Camilla was still … not dead?”

She had certainly given her a wound deep enough to be fatal in a human.
Camilla had fallen, and had not moved.
If that had been only a pretense of death—where had the body gone?

“But I received a report from the soldiers that disposal of the corpse was complete.”
“Yes. Camilla’s body was discarded. Together, however, with the corpse of an otherworlder summoned at nearly the same time.”
“An otherworlder? They possessed high magical power. There is no telling what would happen if a vampire’s power were passed to such a person! Why together—”
“… Because there was a person who gave that instruction.”

Sara said it in a small voice, but clearly.
Lily looked at her, head somewhat down, tone dark, and understood.

“It cannot be. Sara … you gave the instruction?”

Sara nodded, small.
Affirmation.
It was a possibility Lily would have preferred not to consider.
Having it admitted, she had no choice but to accept it.

“Ah. I see. In other words—this present situation, even if indirectly, was made by you, Sara. Ha, hahaha. That is why—that is why you were not shaken, even seeing Gravard gone …!”
“There is one thing I wish to say.”
“What.”
“If, at that time, you had accepted Camilla, no lives would have been wasted.”
“—!”

The selfishness of it sent the blood to Lily’s head at once.
Her mind was already unstable. In her anger she drew her sword before she knew it.
And she set the blade, of all places, to Sara’s throat.

“Don’t be absurd! It is not only the capital and Gravard. People are dying across the whole kingdom. Countless people! And you feel no responsibility for that?!”
“The kingdom does not matter to me. Father did not love me, nor Mother. If I had you, that was enough. So I do not care who dies.”
“Sara!”

Strength gathered in the hand on the hilt.
In Lily’s values, she was unmistakably a criminal.
Not only the people.
The king, the ministers, the knights—the essential persons who constituted the kingdom were all dead.
The loss was far too great.
If one matched it against the “rightness” the captain of the knights believed in, there was only one judgment to pass.

“Will you kill me?”
“I must. It is true that the royal blood is needed to restore the kingdom. But I cannot leave alive the very person who gave the kingdom its ruin!”
“Do you want to kill me, Lily?”
“I have to kill you!”

Her voice was shaking.
It was not that Lily felt nothing for Sara.
It had been the same with Camilla. The feeling called love existed in her as well.
A sense of duty that overrode it interfered, and ruined everything.

“That is not what I asked. What does Lily herself think?”
“… You know already. It was so with Camilla, and of course it is so with you. I cannot want to kill you. But—!”
“Then you need not kill me.”
“I cannot do that! It is the action I must take as captain of the knights, and—”

Sara spoke first, as if she had read Lily’s heart.

“If you do otherwise, you will cease to be yourself. Is that it?”

Lily had nothing else, and so she feared losing that more than anything.
Simply put, her parents had failed in raising her.
Or rather—it had gone as intended.
They had denied every other value, so that she would be unable to choose another road, so that she would give up, believing there was nowhere to run.

“Yes. That is it. You may abuse me. You may hate me. This is all, probably, ego. But I … I have no other way left to live.”

Even if everyone called her pitiful.
This was not a matter of feeling.

“May I say one last thing?”
“I will not stop you.”

Lily waited for her words.
Pink lips moved, and spun speech.
Even with death before her she showed no fear at all, as if she had known it would come to this.
With resignation, and with love.

“I love you, Lily. Even if you kill me, I love you more than anyone in the world.”

She is smiling.
She is smiling.
She is smiling.
Ah—and it never becomes the past tense.
The blade slides. The head falls. Life runs out.
The young severed head, still smiling, looks this way with empty eyes.
Even in death, she was beautiful.

Lily stood rooted, looking steadily at her face.
They might never have looked at one another for so long.
Then, after a while, Sara’s body began to vanish as if sinking into a swamp.
She was swallowed into black shadow.

“So you were watching after all. Vampire.”

Lily spoke in a loud voice toward an emptiness where no one stood.

“What will you do with Sara’s body … no. None of my concern, I suppose. Tell me. Do you think me pitiful as well? Will you laugh at a fool who threw away the happiness she might have had?”

She did not especially mind.
Just now, she rather wanted to be mocked and laughed off.
She had killed the princess, after all.
She had fled with the princess to protect the kingdom, and had killed the princess for the kingdom’s order.
It was a contradiction.
If she followed her own standard of judgment, she had had no other choice.

“In the end, Sara was right about all of it. If I had not cut Camilla down. If I had only accepted what Camilla felt. It would not have come to this. Well … no matter how I struggled, a person like me could never have done such a thing. Haha …”

She felt like dying and being done with it, but suicide would not do.
Because it was not correct.
Nowhere to die, and nowhere to live.
Holding a rightness riddled with contradictions, Lily set her feet on the sand and began to walk, with nowhere to go.